THE CLIL TOUR

THE CLIL TOUR

16th may 2018

Also this year prof.re Grison and prof.ssa Rigo have proposed to the students of 4^E a Clil tour, a series of presentations in English regarding a certain philosophical theme. This year the theme of the tour was identity and its connections with memory.

The input given by the teachers was the theory of identity in John Locke and David Hume, Jason Bourne’s film trilogy and the Victorian Age novel by Robert Louis Stevenson “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde”. The students’s task was to think and reflect upon those themes and create a Powerpoint or a Prezi work on a film or a book they read in the past in order to elaborate a personal presentation linked with the themes studied.

Here there are some masterpieces chosen by the students.

“Memento”, by Christopher Nolan, concerns the theme of identity through the character of Leonard. He is affected by continuous amnesia and he can’t remember what he has just done: he is condemned to be the same man forever.

“True Marriage of the Spotless Mind” is a famous film where a couple wants to break up and in order to forget forever their love they delete their memories. In this way they will begin to know themselves better.

“Matrix” concerns the theme of memory because Neo, the protagonist, is a human whose entire life is a mere illusion created by machines. So, if his life until now was a sort of dream, who is he in reality?

“The picture of Dorian Gray” can be read as an alternative to Stevenson’s novel. Dorian doesn’t get old thanks to his mysterious pact with the devil but his picture gets worse and worse each time he commits an evil act. He is beautiful outside but horrible inside and the picture represents his evilness, his real self.

“The Truman Show” is a film about Truman, an ordinary man born in a fake city, where his entire life is a reality show and he doesn’t know it. But he is a self-made man who wants to overcome his restrictions: he can choose to follow the truth escaping from the city or keeping a fake identity, created by the television.

“The Danish Girl” is a book telling the real story of Lili Elbe, a Danish girl born as Einar Wegener, a painter who later changed sex and identity: he is struggling to find and realize hi true self as he feels uncomfortable with his body and wants to change it to become entirely Lili.

“Still Alice” is the very emotional story of Alice Howland, a woman affected by Alzheimer, a disease that erases people’s memories. It seems that these people lose also themselves but this is not true because she states that, even though she continues forgetting everything, she still feels Alice.

“Westworld” is a TV series set in a city where people, called guests, can live with Host, robots whose memories are erased every night but who retain some vague visions as dreams, called remembrances: both human and robots must find who they truely are.

“The Prestige”, by Christopher Nolan, is the story of two illusionists. They are rivals and they both show their trick of the teleportation to the public but one shifts with his twin, while the other one uses the cloning machine created by Tesla, killing his original self in order to trick the public. While the twins live one single life, the other prestige lives more lives.

During War World Two, the deprivation of identity was operated by the Nazi in the concentration camps. Hannah Arendt in her “Eichmann in Jerusalem” condemned that evil, which made people became things, instruments, numbers. People in the concentration camps could not think of their past because their only aim was to survive: with their memories they were losing a part of themselves.

As students, we can claim that the CLIL Tour has been a positive opportunity for us to introduce and work on something personal which even our teachers did not know, and it has been an important moment to let our teachers know us from a different point of view.

According to the 21st century skills, the CLIL tour is a concrete fulfillment of :

Communication (as we spoke for at least 10 minutes explaining the reasons for our choices);

Creative thinking (as we had to start from the task but connect it to our personal like);

Collaboration (we students and two teachers working together);

Creativity (as we had to create a personal work choosing pictures and writing explanations).